Cobwebs, dusting, spluttering

Away for the longest time, what with work and offline occurrences and what not. I could claim that I was readying for the roll-out of an extraordinary bongoludo 2.0, but it would be a tiny flaming lie.

Hope all well with you and all of your doings, normal intermittent and patchy service will be resumed anon.

Howsabout them Nintendos? Remember when they used to make these? Not me, nor my feet.

And the first thing I've read on Salon in years, a whacking great interviewathon with Richard Dawkins. That is all.

That Pipettes Pip The Feeling Feeling

Stop Press: the race for my pop heart is wide open again: just saw this.

And here's the Russ Meyer Valley Of The Dolls clip of which it is the splendid ripoff.

Feeling The Feeling Walk The Talk

I did my best, really I did, but my best clearly isn't good enough, not even hardly, nowhere near. I know I just swore fealty to The Pipettes (who despite all the music critics saying they're very good, really are very, very good), but The Feeling, oh man, The Feeling. It's like being a teenager again. You know those psych experiments where they wired up the pleasure centre of a rat's brain to a switch and the poor rodenty fucker just Morsed the switch constantly? That's me spamming iTunes for the The Feeling single "Fill My Little World". I'm unsure what else I could possibly demand of a pop group other than the immediate eradication of poverty and Sunny Delight. Giddy-making. These are clear signs of accelerated aging, aren't they? Cardigan time yet?

*looks down at own M&S cashmere-clad wrists.

Oh.

Mamas, and Brand New Bagquisition

OK, obviously, The Pipettes have conquered me utterly and forever, but am equally smitten with the wondrous Onya Bag, which I fear each and every one of my friends and family is about to receive as birthday/Crimble prezzo. Simply splendid, and no doubt the first slither down the slippery slope to outright green-loonery. I shall devote my trouser turn-ups to composting humous. Or at least admit that it's happening, and pretend it's deliberate.

Existential Disclaimers

A lot of the confusion about what games are/could be/should be comes from treating games as their plots or backstory. This turns them into texts, which means the world and his wife can swarm over them with their cool, cruel text-deconstructin' irons. This, in my book, tends to be theory about theory. In his actual and excellent book A Theory Of Fun, Raph Koster pointed out that games just aren't their plots. The brouhaha about killing pedestrians in Carmaggedon was lost on the kids playing it, who realised it was actually Pacman, not a homicidal highway hecatomb - the game was the gameplay, not the backstory.

I posted on Clive Thompson's Collision Detection in response to his article on True Crime: New York City. Oh lord, here I am, quoting myself. Does that qualify me as a sock puppet? Can I attempt astroturfing now?

I have a quibble with how much we can read into such games - not so much what the paying (hopefully) punters will make of them, that's their affair and rationalising every potential player response is like Casaubon's Key To All Mythologies - endless as a scheme for joining the stars. I'm more concerned with how the developers are arriving at these particular gameplay settings and solutions. Developers are asking themselves purely practical questions: What's going to work? Which Existential Disclaimer Narrative is going to let us put the player in gameplay-worthy situations? What current genres can we dresss the gameplay up as?

I don't dispute that games are some sort of barometer for social themes, memes, trends, what have you, but I'm dubious that they directly reflect anything other than developer/publisher pragmatism. Simply put, it's easier for developers to furnish the player with a convincing homicidal monster than a plausible girlfriend.

Quotable Superstars like Molyneux and Miyamoto aside, developers and publishers just have to get the damn things made, on time, on budget. I'd suggest that the dictates of production incline gameplay towards a simplistic worldview. Being risk-averse doesn't necessarily reflect social conservatism. It's just so much easier to submerge the player and (more importantly) the hidden menu system of the gamplay in the simplistic moral world of the lone avenger than one where the protagonist has to negotiate, socialise, weigh motivations, navigate ambiguity or ambivalence. Menus can't stand ambivalence - they require valence, great big discrete binary blobs of it

Not entirely sure what I was trying to corral together here, but I'm sure there'll be more of it.

Is this thing on? Oh, it IS on...

Here I am, absently weeing on my shoes in what I assumed was an undisturbable backwater of the Inter Nets, hurling the occasional hoot of praise or blame at my Betters, and I'm shocked to find that they upon occasion hoot back.

Andrew Collins I bothered directly via his fine www.wherediditallgoright.com and was nice enough to answer my query upon my own pallid organ, Lost Garden's DanC shied a cheery horseshoe back at me, and now Steven Poole dropped by and was remarkably generous, considering how rude I'd been about (some of) his work. Twit them, and they will come, I tells ya.

This really is rather an august guest list for what remains a furtive, odiferous and obscure scratch pad. A tip o'the hat to 'em all.

Three Colours Tautology

The recent and continuing heatwave reminded me of the similarly kiln-like climate of a few years back. Oppressed by the immense bigness of Hot, a chum and I had sought shelter and refreshment by the South Bank, and were keenly diminishing a several of frosty beverages, exchanging pleasantries while the starch in our collars wilted like somnolent orchids. Swirling the dregs in his latest tankard for a moment or two, he confessed to me that he had the beginnings and makings and shapings of a feuilleton but was sadly baffled and stymied in his attempts to birth it. He had noted examples of references to Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal in some surprisingly mainstream Pop Culture movies.

Alas, he had itemised but two examples of his theory, failing the necessary and sufficient Rule Of Three. It wasn’t enough to have spotted that chess is also played with Death in Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey and that an odd song about farm livestock mooing, clucking, lowing and so on is also sung in Freddy Got Fingered (an opus I fear life may precisely 87 minutes too short to see), he didn’t have Three, the Magic Number. Eheu, lacking the vital trifecta, my chum been forced into idleness, mentally crossed his heels on his desk and crumpling his drafts into aerodynamic pupae to shy at the bin.

I commiserated with him and his tantalisation, whiffling aloud that surely there was a similar boondoggle concerning Genres Of Film That Are Also Colours, And Furthermore Original Packaging Colours At That, Smoke On Your Pipe And Stick That In, Paisan. Intrigued and not a little picqued, he bad me explain my rash claim, nodding curtly to a passing servitor to refresh our whets. Characteristically vague, vain and hasty, my trope was that the terms Noir and Giallo are both colours (if in different languages) and movie genres. What’s more, they relate to the bindings of the original source novels. I can't recall where I first read that Noir relates to the original bindings given to hardboiled detective fiction by French publishers before contrastingly lit black and white movie adaptations were made of them, but Roger Ebert sportingly confirms it.

However, I too lacked my Necessary Third, and we both had to stumble on as best we could. The moment I recalled this contretemps I (and no doubt you) thought “Hang on, what about Blue Movies?” (apparently some of which may be found amidst the InterNets, gentle reader). I’m satisfied to my own satisfaction (tauto-ahoy!) that I can march behind this newly stitched banner of Black, Yellow and Blue, but does it have the gilt edge that only the extended claim can garner? Did Blue movies ever come in blue wrappers, were they ever bound in blue tape? From whence came the name? Is it to do with Blue Laws?

Stylesque

Alas, the usual hop-skip-jump, to clear my otherwise crystalline mind of clutter. I just finished and greatly admired Chuck Palahniuk's collection of straight reportage Stranger Than Fiction. Much to enjoy therein, particularly his ability to convey constellations of moral outrage without recourse to adjectives or adverbs or actual narration. I guess that'll be style, then.

Ah, Style, my man in the moon. Raymond Chandler called it the best investment a writer can make, and he spoke as a former oil man. Flicking through Stranger Than Fiction, even at its most Subject-Verb-Object Peter-loves-Jane stripped down, the prose seemed very quickly fingerable as Palahniuk, although I can't guess why. The clauses are so short and terse, there doesn't seem time for them to develop a characteristic rhythm. And why should it seem distinct from any other example of what might be unkindly deemed post-Hemingwayese?

Without answering that, in a similar but probably unrelated vein, Clive James starts his esay ‘The All Of Orwell’ thus:

“Who wrote this? ‘Political language - and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists - is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.’ But you guessed straight away; George Orwell. The subject stated up front, the sudden acceleration from the scope-widening parenthesis into the piercing argument that follows, the way the obvious opposition between ‘lies’ and ‘truthful’ leads into the shockingly abrupt coupling of ‘murder’ and ‘respectable’, the elegant, reverse-written coda clinched with a dirt-common epithet, the whole easy-seeming pose and compact drive of it, a world view compressed to the size of a motto from a fortune cookie, demanding to be read out and sayable in a single breath - it’s the Orwell style."

James' gloss seems sort of undeniable. I like that passage particularly because it's one of those bits of Orwell one can disagree with, and thus feel all big and clever and thinky. That saw about Political Language has endured in several guises and I still find it hard to get worked up about it in any guise. Suspecting the worst of non-literary language is one of the easier rides for literary people. I remember the otherwise estimable Steven Poole schilling for his book Unspeak on the radio, pointing out that “ethnic cleansing” sounds like it's a good thing but actually it isn't. Heavens, does Her Majesty know? I'm never clear who's supposed to be or have been gulled by such euphemism. Isn't this just rhetoric, and hasn't it been going on forever? Maybe I'm just narked that I found Poole's Trigger Happy impressively unreadable. Every time I see it on a shelf I quiz the owner and every man Jack and Jill of them admit its Vestal inviolability. Them Edge colums weren't no picnic neither, but the fiction reviews in The Guardian and the Crooked Timber posts are often boffo.

Military idiom (WMD, Peace-Keeping, Surgical Strike, Smart Munitions, Less Than Lethal weaponry etc) in particular seems to keep coming in for a shoeing from writers as if its euphemism was a deliberate almost neuro-linguistic programming-ese attempt at moral fraud. But how much sinister intent is there? Who was the original intended audience? Isn't professional slang always divorced from the moral universe - it's there to make usuful trade distinctions, not justify God's way to man.

I was going to tie these limp threads to games somehow, and game design terminology, but as usual my muse has pulled up, puffing, groaning and clutching at the stitch in her ribs. Just can't get the staff these days.

RIP, The Ligster

RIP, Gyorgy Ligeti.

The excellent Alex Ross of The New Yorker and his own www.therestisnoise.com has this to say, and back in 2001 wrote this appreciation of the Big Yyn.

Lest Ligeti be thought some dismal gloom-monging melodyphobe (although heaven only knows - now - how much he'd seen to be gloomy about), check out his amazing Concert Romanesc, abundance of energy, humour and delight composer's own.

A propos of absolutely nothing, Sir Harrison Birtwhistle's comments at the Ivor Novello awards:

"Why is your music so effing loud? You must all be brain-dead. Maybe you are. I didn’t know so many clichés existed until the last half-hour. Have fun. Goodbye."

The Naked Tooth

I am British, and consequently have British Teeth. In the company of my pearl-fanged American friends I answer to “Snaggletooth”, but amongst mine own here in Britain I pass unnoticed in bazaar and highway and meadow alike. My teeth are themselves reminiscent of the Stone Age tumuli of Stonehenge, albeit boasting a less impressive crop of lichen. They are at least a recognizable gang, not all of equal standing, but at least standing together. Some of my friends have teeth resembling the skyline of Easter Island. Moody, magnificent and seldom, their teeth are aloof Kings of gum, much grander in their way than my rowdy Parliament of incisors and molars, jostling for attention. And if they stand aloof, they do at least stand. Other of my friends part their lips to reveal transverse and oblique tusks, much like the bars of a broken old farm gate, or the half boarded-up entrance to the Old Haunted Gold Mine.

It’s unfair. Teeth are THE indicators of health. Our movie stars may have hair like hay, eyes like a surrounded chameleon and the posture of a question mark, but their teeth shine with integrity, wisdom and heroism. This is rubbish. I have heroic teeth. Every chip is an abysmal fall survived, every notch an enemy coolly despatched. I have world-weary, been-there done-that teeth. A mouthful of Bogarts, bidding Bergmanesque farewells, and reminders of our mutual possession of Paris. I am literally hardbitten, and there’s the proof in the shape of my teeth.

Of course, my sister is a dentist. Worse still, an orthodontist. My panicky tight-lipped embraces upon see her again lend new urgency to the old saw about the British keeping a stiff upper lip (and it's the teeth of that saw which my own gums so eloquently mime). She has nice teeth. Teeth you’d trust. But then you have to trust the teeth of those to whom you entrust your teeth.

My dental tendency is towards independence and away from tyranny. My teeth celebrate independence. I have nothing against the dull perfect conformist grins of my IKEA-mouthed counterparts. But their milky teeth betray no wisdom. Theirs are mouths without struggle. Their fat veal-calf teeth are crammed into their mouths are and forbidden to exercise or roam the earth. My teeth have clearly been places. My teeth have seen and done things beyond other teeth’s ken. On several occasions, my teeth only just made it back to my mouth.

My teeth parrot the whites and blacks of the piano keyboard, like the interlaced fingers of a mixed-race couple holding hands. My happy gappy smile reminds pianists to worry their instruments in practice, ensuring better concerts. My teeth would be a metaphor for the prettier, less conscience-wracked songwriters, if only they could see past the blinding glare of their own oral crenelations.

My teeth do their job, no more or less conscienciously nor complainingly than any other part of my frame. I occasionally tease them with an antique toothbrush or fret them with floss but apart from the few occasions when they play the innocent conductor for a roving lightning bolt of agony, they are contented guests in my head, helpful at mealtimes and a foe to all pen ends. Scrupulously egalitarian and prudent, my teeth hoard everything between them, only surrendering their shards of candy and slivers of fruit with graceful reluctance, like a wife shopping her kindly bankrobber husband. My teeth, Oh my teeth gone by, I love you so.